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SNAP Background

The long-term aim of SNAP is to produce a wider range of economic statistics outputs on a consistent basis through time.

The initial strands of the project were:

building on the annual Input-Output framework for Scotland to produce more up-to-date and timely estimates of income, expenditure and production GDP in value terms; and

using UK quarterly National Accounts and other data sources, to produce a greater range of balanced and consistent quarterly economic indicators for Scotland.

This work has been undertaken incrementally and dynamically (i.e. revised over time as new information becomes available to ensure consistency with UK National Accounts definitions and classifications where possible).

Planned and Past Developments

The following is a sample of some of the developments in SNAP:

Building on the review of the Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland (GERS) publication to produce calendar year revenue estimates as an input into the I-O system;

Investigating input prices in addition to output prices for Scottish producers, leading to a double-deflated constant price Input-Output system;

Benchmarking the short-term GVA (output) figures to the constant price Input-Output tables to provide more consistency between our macro-economic outputs and greater scope for meaningful analysis for users;

Quarterly balancing system development

In 2009 a proof-of-concept system was created which explored the use of quarterly output data - consistent with the published quarterly GDP statistics - as a means of creating up-to-date quarterly estimates of income, output and expenditure measures of GDP in cash values. Further details are available here: Arithmetic Estimation of Quarterly Supply/Use (QSU) Tables

A trial publication of quarterly balanced GDP was first issued in October 2010 for 2010 Q2. Since then the system has been further developed and the regular quarterly experimental statistics publication has become the Quarterly National Accounts Scotland. This product has now been submitted for assessment by the UK Statistics Authority as a National Statistics product.